Death Of The GOP? Bring It On!

Covering Up The Cover Up by Nancy Ohanian

Devin Nunes, a Central Valley Trumpist goon, is the ranking Republican on the House Intel Committee. One of his staffers, Derek Harvey, has been leaking the whistleblower's name. That's illegal. But Harvey hasn't been arrested and Nunes hasn't fired him. Mark Zaid, one of the whistleblower’s attorneys: "Exposing the identity of the whistleblower and attacking our client would do nothing to undercut the validity of the complaint’s allegations. What it would do, however, is put that individual and their family at risk of harm. Perhaps more important, it would deter future whistleblowers from coming forward in subsequent administrations, Democratic or Republican."

Do you remember Greg Mankiw? His name used to be in the news very regularly, at least for an economist. (He's a New Keynesian.) He's an author and columnist but he's probably best known for having been George W. Bush's chair of the Council of Economic advisors and then for being both Romney campaign's chief economic advisor. Until yesterday, Mankiw was a Republican opponent of Trump's. Yesterday he left the Republican Party. "I just came back from city hall," he wrote on his blog, "where I switched my voter registration from Republican to unenrolled (aka independent)... [T]he Republican Party has largely become the Party of Trump. Too many Republicans in Congress are willing, in the interest of protecting their jobs, to overlook Trump's misdeeds (just as too many Democrats were for Clinton during his impeachment). I have no interest in associating myself with that behavior. Maybe someday, the party will return to having honorable leaders like Bush, McCain, and Romney. Until then, count me out."




Like all the conservatives fleeing the GOP, Mankiw is ferociously anti-progressive and insists the Democrats nominate a conservative, someone more like Bush or Romney. He says he wants to see Status Quo Joe, Mayo Pete, Amy Klobuchar or Andrew Yang as the party nominee. He rails against Bernie and Elizabeth. Of course. Conservative Republicans would be perfectly happy with a conservative Democrat instead of Trump but conservatives don't want an agent of change, especially not Bernie. Just tune in to Comcast TV any day and you will hear NeverTrump Republicans, ex-Republicans or wealthy conservaDems talking about how Bernie makes their skin crawl.

Charlie Sykes is another prominent Republican who opposes Trump. He's the editor of The Bulwark, the conservative anti-Trump bastion. But his column of advice to Republicans on how to survive their impeachment nightmare was in Politico. Denial, he wrote to Senate Republicans, won't work. And there's no escape. They now know they "are going to have to render a verdict not just on Donald’s Trump’s policies, but on his personal conduct... You’ll have to vote up or down and your decision will have consequences that will linger long past this election cycle. The situation is already grim. 'It feels like a horror movie,' one senator recently told the Washington Post. But it is all about to get worse: the evidence, the venue and the president’s conduct. There may be more smoking guns, the trial will be televised, and based on the past few weeks, Trump is likely to be more unhinged than ever. In honor of the season, I offer you some unsolicited Halloween-themed advice to help you navigate the coming nightmare. If you take this advice, you have a chance of saving your party. Ignore it, and, well, you’ve seen what happens in those horror movies, right?

1. Don’t hide in the basement.

So far you and your fellow Republicans have been able to hide behind complaints about process and the claim that the impeachment probe is “illegitimate.” Your colleagues in the House actually stormed the secure hearing room in the basement of the Capitol and complained about the process even as a few dozen GOP lawmakers were inside being part of that process. It was juvenile and self-defeating. Sooner or later, you will have to confront the substance of case; and that is not likely to get any better.

You have to consider the possibility that there may be more transcripts, more tapes, more whistleblowers. The new evidence is not likely to be exculpatory, because the president’s conduct in pressuring foreign governments for dirt on the Bidens and obstructing justice has already been well documented.

The venue will also change. Republicans are complaining that the process has been secretive, but be careful what you wish for. The trial will be must-see television and not even Fox News will be able to keep much of the evidence from your constituents. Polls already suggest historically high support for the impeachment inquiry, and we have not even begun those public hearings. In short, pretending that the facts aren’t facts-- that you’ll be safe behind your flimsy justification-- is not going to help when everything is out in the open. Deal with it.

2. To kill the monster requires confronting how you made him.

As you watch this reckless and unleashed presidency it may have occurred to you how much you have contributed to this moment. You have convinced Trump that he can take you for granted. The president has bullied and berated you and, again and again, you have rolled over. And it has made things only worse.

Trump’s instinct is to escalate both his tactics and his language. The cascade of stories in just the last week-- Ukraine, Syria, the G-7 and Doral, the launching of a criminal probe against his own Department of Justice, his reference to critics as “human scum”-- are a microcosm of his presidency and where we are going.

Between now and the beginning of the Senate trial, that behavior could become even more erratic and you will be forced to defend an ever-widening gyre of inanities, deceptions, abuses of power, episodes of self-dealing and other assorted outrages. Imagine six months of Giuliani butt-dials.

The first step to saving your life is to recognize what the monster feeds on. In this case, it’s your fear of standing up to him.

3. You survive only if you fight back.

All the craziness might suggest that a policy of strategic silence is the best option. This includes not signing on to more resolutions like the one authored by Sen. Lindsey Graham condemning the House inquiry. Graham may be immune to humiliation and indifferent to history’s verdict, but you likely will not be.

You probably also think you can finesse this by finding a middle ground where you can acknowledge that the call to the Ukrainian president was inappropriate and Trump’s behavior questionable, but not impeachable.

But Trump may not let you. The president and his loudest supporters continue to insist that (a) the phone call with the Ukrainian president was “perfect,” (b) there was no quid pro quo, and (c) even if there was one, it was completely appropriate. Indeed, on Monday he urged to stop focusing on process and defend the merits of his actions. “I'd rather go into the details of the case rather than process... Process is good, but I think you ought to look at the case.”

The problem is that “the genius of our great president” demands total fealty. He will insist that acquittal be considered total exoneration, and he intends you to be a part of the whitewash. He wants you to embrace and ratify his conduct; and if you do, you will own it.

4. The sequel is often scarier than the original.

You need to consider the full implications of the precedent you will be setting if you vote to acquit the president. Imagine a second Trump term beyond the reach of credible constitutional accountability. Consider what that would mean for our political culture, constitutional norms and the future of your party.

“The boundaries of acceptable presidential behavior are defined by which actions the political system tolerates or condemns,” writes Lawfare’s Benjamin Wittes.

We are already “perilously close to the point at which there may no longer be a national consensus that there’s anything constitutionally problematic about using governmental powers to advance one’s own pecuniary and electoral interests.”

Writes Wittes: “If a substantial group of members of Congress signals not merely that the president’s conduct does not warrant impeachment and removal but also that it does not even warrant branding as intolerable, such conduct will become normalized-- at a great cost to previously unquestioned first principles of constitutional governance-- even if the House impeaches Trump.”

This is why you should pay more attention to the Federalist Papers than Fox News.

On Fox News, the impeachment proceedings will be characterized as a “coup,” or an attempt to “overturn an election.” But they are neither.

5. Your ultimate weapon is always within reach.

Alexander Hamilton clearly envisioned impeachment as a constitutional check on “the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust.” He understood that impeachment proceedings were, by their nature, political, “as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself.” He also had no illusions about how divisive the process would be, noting that impeachment “will seldom fail to agitate the passions of the whole community,” and that “in such cases there will always be the gravest danger that the decision will be regulated more by the comparative strength of parties, than by the real demonstrations of innocence or guilt.”

But the founders reposed their confidence in you; or rather in what they thought the Senate would be. “Where else than in the Senate could have been found a tribunal sufficiently dignified, or sufficiently independent?” What other body, asked Hamilton, would feel confident enough “to preserve, unawed and uninfluenced, the necessary impartiality,” between the accused “and the REPRESENTATIVES OF THE PEOPLE, HIS ACCUSERS?” (Emphasis Hamilton’s.)

There’s a good reason to listen to Hamilton here-- for the sake of the GOP.

Consider this: What if, instead of breaking with Richard Nixon in 1974, Republicans had stuck with him, deciding that Nixon’s impeachment was a test of tribal loyalty? What would the consequences have been if they had voted to acquit him on charges of obstructing justice, lying to the public, contempt of Congress and abuse of power? Specifically, what would it have meant for the Republican Party had it embraced the defense of Nixon’s corruption? If it had been less Barry Goldwater and more Lindsey Graham?

We know what actually happened. Even after abandoning Nixon, the GOP was punished in 1974 and 1976, but it was able to otherwise wipe the stink off relatively quickly, winning back the presidency in 1980 and holding it for 12 years.

But what if the party had gone all Watergate-is-no-big-deal? If it had, it’s unlikely that Ronald Reagan would even have been elected, because the GOP would have been haunted by Nixon for a generation.

In your idle moments, you have perhaps wondered what your legacy will be. Here’s the answer; history will remember what you do over the next few months.

Short term, breaking with Trump will spark a nasty blowback. But imagine for a moment a post-Trumpian Republican Party freed from the baggage of Trumpist corruption. The choice is between a party inextricably tied to Trump, with all of his crudity, dishonesty, lawlessness and arrogance, and a party that has shown that it is capable of being a principled defender of constitutional norms.

At the end of this process, the simple narrative is likely to be that the president has abused his power, broken the law and sold out his country. You have an opportunity to hold him accountable by doing your constitutional duty. History will want to know whether you got scared and shirked it.

Can Trump Turn The Fed Into A Bastion Of Trumpnomics-- Enough To Make The Coming Recession Into A Depression?

When Trump nominated crackpot Stephen Moore for a spot on the Fed, I was shocked. That's even a crazy move for Trump. What was I missing? I asked the smartest economist I know, Stephanie Kelton. All she would say is that "It’s not an inspired choice, to say the least. Paul McCulley would have been an inspired choice." Conservative economist Greg Mankiw was considerably more forthcoming on his thoughts about the nomination.

Mankiw isn't famous because he teaches economics at Harvard, though he does. He's famous because he worked for both Bush-- for whom he served as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors-- and for Mitt Romney. In 2011, while he was advising Romney and teaching at Harvard, dozens of students walked out of his lecture and went to a Occupy Wall Street demonstration, handing him an open letter on the way out:

Today, we are walking out of your class, Economics 10, in order to express our discontent with the bias inherent in this introductory economics course. We are deeply concerned about the way that this bias affects students, the University, and our greater society.

As Harvard undergraduates, we enrolled in Economics 10 hoping to gain a broad and introductory foundation of economic theory that would assist us in our various intellectual pursuits and diverse disciplines, which range from Economics, to Government, to Environmental Sciences and Public Policy, and beyond. Instead, we found a course that espouses a specific-- and limited-- view of economics that we believe perpetuates problematic and inefficient systems of economic inequality in our society today.

A legitimate academic study of economics must include a critical discussion of both the benefits and flaws of different economic simplifying models. As your class does not include primary sources and rarely features articles from academic journals, we have very little access to alternative approaches to economics. There is no justification for presenting Adam Smith’s economic theories as more fundamental or basic than, for example, Keynesian theory.

Care in presenting an unbiased perspective on economics is particularly important for an introductory course of 700 students that nominally provides a sound foundation for further study in economics. Many Harvard students do not have the ability to opt out of Economics 10. This class is required for Economics and Environmental Science and Public Policy concentrators, while Social Studies concentrators must take an introductory economics course-- and the only other eligible class, Professor Steven Margolin’s class Critical Perspectives on Economics, is only offered every other year (and not this year). Many other students simply desire an analytic understanding of economics as part of a quality liberal arts education. Furthermore, Economics 10 makes it difficult for subsequent economics courses to teach effectively as it offers only one heavily skewed perspective rather than a solid grounding on which other courses can expand. Students should not be expected to avoid this class-- or the whole discipline of economics-- as a method of expressing discontent.

Harvard graduates play major roles in the financial institutions and in shaping public policy around the world. If Harvard fails to equip its students with a broad and critical understanding of economics, their actions are likely to harm the global financial system. The last five years of economic turmoil have been proof enough of this.

We are walking out today to join a Boston-wide march protesting the corporatization of higher education as part of the global Occupy movement. Since the biased nature of Economics 10 contributes to and symbolizes the increasing economic inequality in America, we are walking out of your class today both to protest your inadequate discussion of basic economic theory and to lend our support to a movement that is changing American discourse on economic injustice. Professor Mankiw, we ask that you take our concerns and our walk-out seriously.

His fame increased when he announced on CNBC that he wouldn't vote for Trump in 2016. On his blog he explained in more detail why he wouldn't vote for the Republican candidate for president:

I have Republican friends who think that things couldn't be worse than doubling down on Obama policies under Hillary Clinton. And, like them, I am no fan of the left's agenda of large government and high taxes. But they are wrong: Things could be worse. And I fear they would be under Mr. Trump.

Mr. Trump has not laid out a coherent economic worldview, but one recurrent theme is hostility to a free and open system of international trade. From my perspective as an economics policy wonk, that by itself is disqualifying.

And then there are issues of temperament. I am not a psychologist, so I cannot figure out what Mr. Trump's personal demons are. But he does not show the admirable disposition that I saw in previous presidents and presidential candidates I have had the honor to work for.

I don't get the feeling he intends to vote for Trump in 2020 either. On Friday he wrote that the only good thing he credited Trump with, in his opinion, "making good appointments to the Fed.... Jay Powell, Rich Clarida, and Randy Quarles. Then today the president nominates Stephen Moore to be a Fed governor. Steve is a perfectly amiable guy, but he does not have the intellectual gravitas for this important job. If you doubt it, read his latest book Trumponomics (or my review of it). It is time for Senators to do their job. Mr. Moore should not be confirmed."

Moore wrote the universally panned book with Arthur Laffer and Mankiw's review for Foreign Affairs was titled Snake-Oil Economics-- The Bad Math Behind Trump’s Policies. Moore and Laffer, he wrote, presented their findings in the voice of "rah-rah partisans... who do not build their analysis on the foundation of professional consensus or serious studies from peer-reviewed journals. They deny that people who disagree with them may have some logical points and that there may be weaknesses in their own arguments. In their view, the world is simple, and the opposition is just wrong, wrong, wrong. Rah-rah partisans do not aim to persuade the undecided. They aim to rally the faithful." He feels that their "over-the-top enthusiasm" for Señor Trumpanzee's "sketchy economic agenda is not likely to convince anyone not already sporting a 'Make America Great Again' hat." 

Moore and Laffer served as economic advisers to Trump during his campaign and after he was elected president (along with Larry Kudlow, the current director of the National Economic Council, who wrote the book’s foreword). From this experience, Moore and Laffer apparently learned the importance of flattering the boss. In the first chapter alone, they tell us that Trump is a “gifted orator” who is always “dressed immaculately.” He is “shrewd,” “open-minded,” “no-nonsense,” and “bigger than life.” He is a “commonsense conservative” who welcomes “honest and fair-minded policy debates.” He is the “Mick Jagger of politics” with a contagious “enthusiasm and can-doism.”

The authors’ approach to policy is similarly bereft of nuance. In Chapter 3, they sum it up by proudly recounting what Moore told Trump about U.S. President Barack Obama during the campaign: “Donald, just look at all the things that Obama has done on the economy over the past eight years, and then do just the opposite.”

It is hard to imagine more simplistic, misguided advice. To be sure, Moore and Laffer can reasonably hold policy positions and political values to the right of those of Obama. (As someone who chaired the White House Council of Economic Advisers during the George W. Bush administration, so do I.) But the Obama administration was filled with prominent economic advisers who were well within the bounds of mainstream economics: Jason Furman, Austan Goolsbee, Alan Krueger, Christina Romer, and Lawrence Summers, to name but a few. It is not tenable to suggest that with all this talent, the administration made only wrong decisions, and that they were wrong simply because those who made them were Democrats.

The tribalism of Moore and Laffer’s approach stems primarily from their devotion to a single issue: the level of taxation. Obama pursued higher taxes, especially on higher-income households. His goal was to fund a federal government that was larger and more active than many Republicans would prefer and to use the tax system to “spread the wealth around,” as he famously told Joe Wurzelbacher, known as Joe the Plumber, a man he encountered at a campaign stop in Ohio in 2008. By contrast, Moore and Laffer want lower taxes, especially on businesses, which in their view would promote faster economic growth.

The debate over taxes reflects a classic, ongoing disagreement between the left and the right. In 1975, Arthur Okun, a Brookings economist and former adviser to President Lyndon Johnson, wrote a short book called Equality and Efficiency: The Big Tradeoff. Okun argued that by using taxes and transfers of wealth to equalize economic outcomes, the government distorts incentives-- or that, to put it metaphorically, the harder the government tries to ensure that the economic pie is cut into slices of a similar size, the smaller the pie becomes. Based on this argument, the main priority of the Democratic Party is to equalize the slices, whereas the main priority of the Republican Party is to grow the pie.

Yet Moore and Laffer aren’t willing to admit that making policy requires confronting such difficult tradeoffs. Laffer is famous for his eponymous curve, which shows that tax rates can reach levels high enough that cutting them would yield enough growth to actually increase tax revenue. In that scenario, the tradeoff between equality and efficiency vanishes. The government can cut taxes, increase growth, and use the greater tax revenue to help the less fortunate. Everyone is better off.

The Laffer curve is undeniable as a matter of economic theory. There is certainly some level of taxation at which cutting tax rates would be win-win. But few economists believe that tax rates in the United States have reached such heights in recent years; to the contrary, they are likely below the revenue-maximizing level. In practice, the big tradeoff between equality and efficiency just won’t go away.

Trumponomics is full of exhortations about the importance of economic growth. Why, Moore and Laffer ask, should Americans settle for the two percent growth that many economists have been projecting? Wouldn’t every problem be easier to solve with a more rapidly expanding economy? The book quotes Trump as claiming, when announcing his tax plan in December 2017, that it would not increase the budget deficit because it would raise growth rates to “three, or four, five, or even six percent.”

The authors offer no credible evidence that the tax changes passed will lead to such high growth. Most studies yield far more modest projections. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the Trump tax cuts will increase growth rates by 0.2 percentage points per year over the first five years. A study by Robert Barro (a conservative economist at Harvard) and Furman (a liberal economist at Harvard) published in 2018 estimates that the tax bill will increase annual growth by 0.13 percentage points over a decade. And that is if the changes are made permanent. Barro and Furman estimate that as the legislation is written, with many of the provisions set to expire in 2025, it will increase annual growth by a mere 0.04 percentage points over ten years.

It is conceivable that standard economic models underestimate the impact of tax cuts on growth. A research paper by the economists Christina Romer and David Romer published in 2010 examined historical tax changes and found that they had larger effects on economic activity than standard models suggest. (It is worth noting that these two authors’ political leanings are left of center, so their findings are not the result of ideological taint.) One might reasonably argue that Trump’s tax cuts will increase growth over the next decade by as much as half a percentage point per year. But that is a long way from the one- to four-percentage-point boost that the president and his associates have bragged of, and that Moore and Laffer quote without explanation, caveat, or apology.

...Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of Trumponomics is the long list of crucial issues on which the authors are largely silent. They offer no cogent plans to deal with global climate change, the long-term fiscal imbalance from growing entitlement spending, or the increase in economic inequality that has occurred over the past half century. Many reasonable Republicans would support a tax on carbon emissions, for example. Such a policy would slow climate change by incentivizing the movement toward cleaner energy, as well as provide revenue that could be used to close the fiscal gap or to help those struggling at the bottom of the economic ladder.

Rather than suggesting coherent policies, Moore and Laffer seem to hope that a much more rapidly growing economy will provide the resources to address all these problems, and they seem to believe that this growth will follow ineluctably from the lower taxes and deregulation that lie at the heart of Trump’s agenda. It would be wonderful if that were possible. Maybe rah-rah partisans really believe it is. But more likely, it is just wishful thinking. Trump appears eager to avoid most of the economic problems facing the nation. By banking on so much growth from cutting taxes, Moore and Laffer are, in effect, giving him a pass and kicking the can down the road to a future leader more interested in confronting hard policy choices.

Are there enough Republicans in the Senate with enough good sense and courage to deny Moore his confirmation? I doubt it. In fact, it's probably more likely that Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin vote to confirm that it is that more than one or two Republicans vote not to, even though some Republicans have been grumbling about Moore's column advocating that Trump fire Fed Chair Jay Powell (a Trump appointee who, like so many, Trump quickly soured on).

The Great (Democratic) Divide

There may be a debate raging Inside the Beltway over whether America is a center right nation-- as espoused by self-serving, reactionary corporatists and money grubbers like Doug Schoen-- or a center left nation, the conclusion of Democrats who aren't putting personal self interest first, but the debate is anything but academic. With the greed and selfishness contingent of nominal Democrats from deep in the bowels of the Republican wing of the Democratic Party seeing another cash-in opportunity for themselves and their cronies-- the Robert Rubins, Rahm Emanuels and Doug Schoens of the avaricious side of Democratic politics-- the debate gets mighty personal.

And when idealism and social good go up against personal greed... well, greed usually holds its own pretty well. If that weren't the case there would be no Republican Party, let alone craven Blue Dogs and a Republican wing of the Democratic Party. But no one has framed the ultimate meaning of the debate better than former Labor Secretary Robert Reich in a HuffPo essay on the argument of the rebirth of Keynes. Like most people who put the needs of society ahead of self interest, Reich argues that Obama should get behind a massive stimulus package "focused on building and repairing the nation's crumbling infrastructure, providing help to states to maintain services, and investing in new green technologies in order to wean the nation off oil."

Most Republicans and their right-leaning Democratic fellow travelers don't see it that way, although even some right-wing economists like Greg Mankiw are slowly waking up to reality. Reich hopes they'll be open to the most basic lessons of Keyesianism, that "when the economy has as much underutilized capacity as we have now, and are likely to have more of in 2009 and 2010 (in all likelihood, over 8 percent of our workforce unemployed, 13 percent underemployed, millions of houses empty, factories idled, and office space unused), government spending that pushes the economy to fuller capacity will of itself shrink future deficits."

Conservative supply-siders, meanwhile, will call for income-tax cuts rather than government spending, claiming that people with more money in their pockets will get the economy moving again more readily than can government. They're wrong, too. Income-tax cuts go mainly to upper-income people, and they tend to save rather than spend.

Even if a rebate could be fashioned for the middle class, it wouldn't do much good because, as we saw from the last set of rebate checks, people tend to use extra cash to pay off debts rather than buy goods and services. Besides, individual purchases wouldn't generate nearly as many American jobs as government spending on infrastructure, social services, and green technologies, because so much of we as individuals buy comes from abroad.

So the government has to spend big time. The real challenge will be for government to spend it wisely -- avoiding special-interest pleadings and pork projects such as bridges to nowhere. We'll need a true capital budget that lays out the nation's priorities rather than the priorities of powerful Washington lobbies. How exactly to achieve this? That's the debate we should be having between now and January 20 or 21st.

Most of the Democratic members of Congress are right in the middle of this debate. On the one hand you have Democrats, like the Blue Dogs, who are basically almost as bad as Republicans-- your David Borens, John Barrows, Jim Marshalls, Heath Shulers, Gene Taylors, Chris Carneys, Joe Donnellys, Melissa Beans-- and on the other hand, real Democrats like Donna Edwards, Tammy Baldwin, Jim McGovern, Linda Sánchez, Jesse Jackson, Jan Schakowsky, Ed Markey, John Olver. But between Xavier Becerra and Hank Johnson on the left and Ron Kind and Dennis Moore on the right, you have about 150 Democrats in the middle, liable to swing in any direction depending on circumstances. Many of these will be eager to take a lead from Obama... at least until he does something drastically wrong. And if you want to know what direction he's going in-- well, we'll all have to wait and see... or just read a lot of Digby